Chase joins Bank of America in possible Islamic attack outage

The consumer website of JPMorgan Chase was unavailable on Wednesday afternoon, possibly due to the same hack attack that caused Bank of America to go intermittently dark on Tuesday after threats from a group incensed by the execrable Innocence of Muslims film that has caused turmoil in the Islamic world.

"We're experiencing intermittent issues with Chase.com," a JPMorgan Chase spokesman told MSN Money. "We apologize for any inconvenience and are working to restore full connectivity."

Bank of America suffered similar problems yesterday. A bank spokesman told Reuters at the time that "We are working to ensure full availability," and assuring customers that "We continuously take proactive measures to secure our systems."

The problems that both banks have experienced come after an unverifiable Pastebin message from a group calling itself the "Cyber fighters of Izz ad-din Al qassam" saying that they would "attack the Bank of America and New York Stock Exchange for the first step" in their retaliation for what they called a "Sacrilegious movie insulting all the religions not only Islam."

If, indeed, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase are being attacked by the Islamic "Cyber fighters", they may not be the last. "This attack will continue till the Erasing of that nasty movie," the Pastebin message says. "Beware this attack can vary in type."

Neither bank has identified the type of attack aimed at their websites, but DDoS is, of course, one suspect.

"All the Muslim youths who are active in the Cyber world will attack to American and Zionist Web bases as much as needed such that they say that they are sorry about that insult," say the Cyber fighters of Izz ad-din Al qassam. ®